Q&A with Virginia Pye

  

Photo by Margaret Lampert

 

 

 

Virginia Pye is the author of the new novel Marriage and Other Monuments. Her other books include The Literary Undoing of Victoria Swann. She lives in Cambridge, Massachusetts.

 

Q: What inspired you to write Marriage and Other Monuments, and how did you create your cast of characters?

 

A: Marriage and Other Monuments is set in Richmond, Virginia, where my husband and I raised our two children and lived for 17 years. We moved there as Northerners who had never before lived in the South, though my mother was from South Carolina and my extended family are all Southerners.

 

Over our years there, we put down deep roots in Richmond, and came to love it as a terrific smaller city, with unique qualities and people.

 

I wasn’t in Richmond in the summer of 2020. I was locked down in Cambridge, Massachusetts, where we had moved in 2015. But I was deeply concerned about Richmond and as involved as I could be from afar.

 

Our son was living on his own by then, across the street from the J.E.B. Stuart statue on Monument Avenue. His apartment building suffered damage from an alley dumpster fire, presumably set by counter-protestors. Helicopters flew overhead many nights, and tear gas wafted outside his windows.

 

I was fearful for him, but I also respected the many people of all ages and races who came out to take part in the protests in a positive way. It was a complicated, painful, vivid summer.

 

Many nights I stayed up until one, two, three in the morning watching videos posted on Instagram by student journalists from VCU and others as they documented the marches, protests, and riots.

 

I followed the removal of the Confederate monuments closely, even alerting Richmond friends one morning when I saw online that a crew was on its way toward the Stonewall Jackson statue so they could witness the removal.

 

My long-distance interest prompted my imagination, resulting in this novel, entirely a work of fiction. None of my characters are based on real people and the precise details of the protests and marches that summer have been shaped by the story I invented in the novel.

 

Q: As you noted, the novel is set in Richmond in 2020--how important is setting to you in your writing?

 

A: Setting is everything. I’ve published two novels set in historic China and one novel in Gilded Age Boston—settings and time periods that I loved exploring. Those books required research to build a believable sense of those places.

 

Marriage and Other Monuments is set somewhere I know well from having lived there and visited over several decades. Way back in 2017, I wrote a novel that tried to capture the specialness of Richmond. My agent at the time tried to sell it without success. I kept hoping I could still place a story there.

 

When the events of the summer of 2020 took place, I knew it was time to return to Richmond in my imagination. I wanted to create a story that respects the city’s many complex qualities. 

 

Q: How was the book’s title chosen, and what does it signify for you?

 

A: While working on this novel, I called it Monuments and Marriages. Actually, early on in the process, I called it Of Monuments and Marriages, until an agent said that title sounded like a 19th century treatise. Too highbrow and old fashioned.

 

I sold the book as Monuments and Marriages but as I spoke with my editor, she helped me see that the title wasn’t dynamic enough. It was too static. In a phone call, we tossed around ideas for ways to riff on Monuments and Marriages.

 

I think I blurted out Marriage and Other Monuments and we both instantly knew that was the right title. It has the charge I’d hoped for. It asks unspoken questions: what does a marriage memorialize? What does a marriage stand for? What does a marriage signify?

 

People I know who’ve been married a long time immediately respond when they hear this title. They get it that a marriage is a construction—much like a literal monument—that has many meanings, some of which can feel set in stone.

 

Q: The writer Joanna Rakoff said of the book, “An engrossing, timely family saga, Virginia Pye’s Marriage and Other Monuments explores complicated truths about race and class—and love and desire—in the contemporary south, shining a brilliant light on the turmoil of 2020 through the lens of history.” What do you think of that description?

 

A: I’m flattered and pleased. It was my goal to tell a compelling, page-turning story that also touches on important contemporary themes, such as race and class in a Southern city.

 

Q: What are you working on now?

 

A: Crazily enough, I’ve gone back to a novel that I first wrote in the early 1990s. It was the second novel I ever wrote, and I put it aside when my first child was born.

 

Set in the 1980s, Making Love tells the story of a group of friends who move to New York City after college. It focuses on their entangled relationships, in particular a clandestine love affair between Amber—newly married to Richard, her college sweetheart—and her former lover, Don, who is bisexual and who, early in the novel, is diagnosed with AIDS.

 

When Amber learns this news, she becomes afraid that she, too, might be infected, which, at that time, could mean an early death. Out of fear for her own life, and guilt over her secret romance, she becomes caught up with a cult-like group that pushes participants to uncover past sexual traumas through group pressure, encouraging participants to break with their perceived abusers, often identified as their families.

 

As some readers will recall, in the ‘90s there was a wave of incest revelations and then counter positions that introduced the term “false memories.” I’m looking into all that business, as well as telling a story about a new marriage, and a young woman afraid to choose who to love.  

 

Q: Anything else we should know?

 

A: I hope that readers enjoy Marriage and Other Monuments and find it entertaining and thought-provoking. If you do enjoy it, I hope you’ll consider inviting me to in person or virtual book groups, bookstore visits, or other events. And drop a review on Amazon or Goodreads! And please feel free to reach out via my website: www.virginiapye.com. Happy reading!

 

--Interview with Deborah Kalb. Here's a previous Q&A with Virginia Pye.